Saturday, June 7, 2014

Fresh for a summer morning! Here's our weekly round-up of fav links to other blogs, web sites, articles, & images, gathered for you from around the Twitterverse.
• It's wedding season - here's a look at the architectural design of 19th c. wedding cakes.
• Tabloid-style gossip from 1782: Gen. George Washington revealed to be female!!
• Gambling in London's most ruinous gentleman's clubs.
• Historical how-to: how to make a hedgehog cake.
• Image: From an 18th c. lady's magazine: "women are, naturally, envious of each other."
• George Dodd's Spitalfields, London, 1842.
• Guaranteed to devour your weekend: huge database of largely forgotten pulp magazines from 1900-1940s.
• Misinterpreting Jane: Austen, romance, and the media.
• Rejection letters: how clueless publishers snubbed eleven great authors.
• "Fire burne and cauldron bubble": online exhibition devoted to witchcraft.
• The original fancy jeans - Levi's Spring Bottom Pants, 1905.
• Delightful hand-tinted postcards from 1950s Sweden.
• Image: Start the day off with a raspberry colored silk round-gown from Italy, c. 1790s.
• Testing confirms that book in Harvard's law library is in fact bound in human skin.
• Top ten strangest miracles of the Middle Ages.
• World's oldest pair of pants (3,000 years!) discovered in China's Tarim Basin.
• The Victorian secret language of flowers.
• Cherries are in season! Try Martha Washington's 1749 recipe for "Preserved Cherries."
• This Regency-style redingote costume has been worn in Vanity Fair as well as in Austenland and Death Comes to Pemberley.• Image: Lovely early photograph 1884 of buyers and sellers on a busy market day, Whitby Market Place.
• The use of applique in the 19th & 20th c. fashion.
• Oliver Twist and the corrupted city.
• The life & beautiful work of 17th c. flower still life painter Rachel Ruysch.
• How Victorian comics provide an insight into the lives of people in the 1880s.
• An indenture of apprenticeship, 1734.
• Image: This Toronto ad from 1904 for hair wigs & pieces reads: "Homely People never succeed in anything."
• Did the English invent football to keep young men from touching themselves?
• "The Mona Lisa is designed to frustrate": the history of the smile in portraiture.
• Doublet, coat, or vest - who wore it best?
• Byzantine ancestors of tablet computers found in Yenikapi diggings.
• Image: Mugshot of Goldie Williams, arrested for vagrancy in 1898.Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.

Another delightful collection! I particularly like the hedgehog cake (and the illustration of the cake fountain), the raspberry round gown, and the gorgeous use of applique in 19th- and 20th-century clothing. I also liked the wedding cakes, but couldn't help but notice that the ones pictured had a mausoleum-like air. Even though they were designed to represent Temples of Love, there seems to be more than a hint of the Albert Memorial...

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A Polite Explanation

There’s a big difference in how we use history. But we’re equally nuts about it. To us, the everyday details of life in the past are things to talk about, ponder, make fun of -- much in the way normal people talk about their favorite reality show.

We talk about who’s wearing what and who’s sleeping with whom. We try to sort out rumor or myth from fact. We thought there must be at least three other people out there who think history’s fascinating and fun, too. This blog is for them.